#28
Simile

A great work of literature is like a mountain. Historical forces as powerful and global as geologic processes create it.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a mountain I've been up and down many times since I first came upon it early in my wanderings among the tumultuous range of American Literature. There is a picturesque meadow on those majestic slopes where I like to pause and take in the view:

“All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest... The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

“Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth…”— (Chapter 18, ‘A Flood of Sunshine’)

It’s the hopeless beauty in that meadow that has drawn me back time and again to this mountain that is The Scarlet Letter. “Begin all anew!” shouts Hester Prynne to her benighted lover from her “moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest.”

In that simile is the soul of this mountain. Years ago, smelling that fragrant sorrow, I determined to do just what Hester wanted and begin all anew on that mountainside by crossing over to an untried country, where Hester Prynne’s bastard, Pearl, is no longer a preternatural girl but a dazzling young woman of means.

Why not? The author is like God. Or, perhaps in this case, more like “the Black Man,” the devil in Hawthorne’s original, the symbolic Other.

That Other is the force of history, a geologic process, and it moves an author, any author who attempts a novel, sometimes subducting the work, plunging it back into the unconscious, so that nothing comes of it in the visible world. Then, one might think, the Other is indeed like "the Black Man," stealing away one's best efforts and the soulful life one gave to the work and burying it deep in the heart.

Say to this day, I will write a novel about Hawthorne's Pearl as a young woman -- and "the Black Man" instantly appears rubbed in oil and ready for business. Or else, a prophetic apple rolls across the writing desk. With each bite, cliché transforms into myth.

Tectonic might thunders up from below. Creative writing is like riding thunder. No way to know where it's going, rolling over the heartland, this knell in the emptiness, this toll of the soul. And even if it's based upon a masterpiece of literature, it's like nothing that came before. That's why it's called 'novel.'

Creative writing is like a spouse taken in adultery. What is that need but not to love the worn?

"Begin all anew!" Begin in the "moral wilderness" where the "novel" hides. Only now, with time zeroing in on me, can I open my will to meeting Pearl there, in 1662, twelve years after Hawthorne finished with her. If I do, I want her to fulfill her mother’s ideal: “Showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!”

I've got a working title, Pearl Prynne, and a premise that dovetails the conclusion of the original: “So Pearl--the elf-child,--the demon offspring, as some people, up to that epoch, persisted in considering her--became the richest heiress of her day, in the New World.”

I'll keep you posted on my progress in this untried country, like we were hiking together on an unexplored mountain under featherweight tons of clouds. Like unwritten pages matter. Like you care.